There used to be hordes of buffalo — hundreds of them — back in my village on Borneo island; that was until in the late 80’s when villagers started to open up their land for large scale paddy plantation.

In the old days, buffaloes were a measure of one’s wealth. If you own over 50 buffaloes you were considered rich because every time you needed the money, you could just catch one or two of the beasts and sell them at the market.

Owning fifty buffaloes seemed to the critical mass that one needed to achieve.

Once you reach that number, your wealth would grow — to borrow the phrase often used by Internet marketers — on an autopilot.

This was more so if the herd consisted of mostly female, which often was the case because they normally sell the male buffaloes off due to their high price. Having mostly female in the herd would enable it to multiply in just a matter of a few years.

My family once owned nearly fifty of them; so we were almost rich by my village’s standard!

However, the villagers soon realised that they could not depend on the buffaloes for long, partly because the beasts needed a huge space to live and also because they could die in great number in the event of an epidemic.

So the villagers turned to large-scale agriculture and started to fence up their land and sold off their buffaloes.

Now there are only dozens of the animals left in my village trying to live in whatever open space left for them to roam.

Thankfully, there are still the riparian river reserves that serve as corridors for the buffalo to move about.

Posted in Macro Rambling, Odds and Ends Macro 1 Comment »